The Beginner's Guide Quotes

The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.

Will Thisbee gave me The Beginner's Cook-Book for Girl Guides. It was just the thing; the writer assumes you know nothing about cookery and writes useful hints - "When adding eggs, break the shells first.

It was being a runner that mattered, not how fast or how far I could run. The joy was in the act of running and in the journey, not in the destination. We have a better chance of seeing where we are when we stop trying to get somewhere else. We can enjoy every moment of movement, as long as where we are is as good as where we'd like to be. That's not to say that you need to be satisfied forever with where you are today. But you need to honor what you've accomplished, rather than thinking of what's left to be done (p. 159).

Every beginner possesses a great potential to be an expert in his or her chosen field.

We are not trapped by our thoughts. What we generally do, however, is create thoughts that trap us.” (p.162)

Isn’t it remarkable that almost every child follows the same religion as their parents, and it always just happens to be the right religion!

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

Make no apologies for surviving.

When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.

It isn’t a matter of getting the body you want, it’s a matter of doing the most you can with the body you have.

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.

To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough

Meditation is silence, energising and fulfilling. Silent is the eloquent expression of the inexpressible.

Find something you enjoy doing and give it everything you've got, and the money will take care of itself.

Run naked through your fears.

Establishing dominance early in the relationship is key. Vampire children are like human children in that they can sense weakness. They will wait for you to be busy or too distracted to realize that you’ve given them permission to feed on the pizza guy. —Siring for the Stupid: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Newborn Vampires

How can you tell when someone loves the real you and not the idea of you?” “They see you at your lowest,” he said softly, pitching his voice so Cruz had no hope of overhearing, “and they don’t blink. They don’t offer you a hand up, they offer you a hand to hold while you rise on your own.

Focus on where you are instead of where you wish you were. The joy will follow.

The thing about love is, when you’re raised with an excess, the overflow splashes onto those around you.

We talk of independence. No man is independent. We are all interdependent; and we shall only rise as we carry others with us, and as we are assisted by others.

Love isn’t a straight path,” he advised. “You don’t know how twisted it will get until you try walking it.

A person who owns property and has a stake in the enterprise is likely to work harder and feel happier and do a better job than a person who doesn

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

All good friendships changed the people within them to a better version of themselves.

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system

Just remember that money cannot buy you happiness (although it might make misery more tolerable).

There is no such thing as a leap into literacy.

We all deserve someone who takes care of us, even when we don’t need it.

All good partnerships ought to require both people to take turns being the damsel, like a team-building exercise.

I love you," she said, stomach growling. "You love bacon." "I have a big heart," she protested. "There's room enough for both of you in it.

Many who work magic with crystals and stones will tell say that the stones choose you, rather than the other way around.

One should plan for spiritual enlightenment. At least bring a flashlight.

Wounded animals heal best in their dens. You owe no one an apology for doing whatever it takes to survive.

you learned appreciation when people proved your worth by spending time with you instead of money on you.

Their love wasn’t simple. Practice gave it an effortless appearance, but that was far from the truth. It was a kind word in the morning, a thoughtful meal prepared without request, a kiss before parting ways, a kiss when coming back together. A million tiny kindnesses sprinkled throughout the days, the months, the years.

Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Your progress as a runner is a frustratingly slow process of small gains. It’s a matter of inching up your mileage and your pace. It’s a matter of learning to celebrate the small gains as if they were Olympic victories. It means paying your dues on the road or the treadmill. It means searching for the limits of your body and demanding that your spirit not give up. It means making the most of what you have. It means making yourself an athlete one workout at a time.

When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can’t prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don’t positively know there are no gods, just as we can’t prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can’t prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist. There’s a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove.

If you are working with authors, you are accepting a great responsibility and must tread very carefully. The author's work is a part of herself, a creative endeavor she has poured her heart and soul into. Protecting and nurturing that work and the author is part of the job of a publisher.

A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

Don't compliment me in the middle of an argument. It won't make me stammer or blush, and it just makes you look desperate.

Depression was an old coat I sometimes wore. It fit too tight in the shoulders and pinched as I moved, but taking it off required herculean effort,

Traditional woods used for sacred brooms include birch, ash, and willow.

The mind is just like a muscle - the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.” -Idowu Koyenikan

Content shared in the right communities can reach ‘king’ status if you know where to post it…

Don’t bother getting out of bed. The world is crowded enough without you and your big ideas.

The only magic in our lives as runners is the magic of consistency. Not every run will make you feel great.

Being a good person is hard. Doing the right thing is hard. That’s why only masochists keep a clean nose.

Unfortunately, motor vehicles are also responsible for 1.25 million accidental deaths every year (and more than ten times as many serious injuries),

Trying harder doesn’t always equal more success; it leads to more frustration, less satisfaction, and giving up.

Scientific truths are true even if there’s nobody around to know about them; were true before humans appeared; will be true after we are extinct.

You long to go ito nature because nature doesn't care about you. To be clear, it's not that nature sees you, accepts you for who you are, and loves you anyway: nature just doesn't give a shit about you.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed, distracted and out of sorts. Turn your attention to your breath, inhale, exhale, and listen to the sound and movement of your everyday breath flowing softly in and out through your nose. You will reclaim your calm and refocus on what matters.

The problem is that you THINK that you have to be motivated to do something, instead of just doing it and then having it done. Tip: The willingness to do things comes with action. Don’t wait until you feel like going to the gym and exercising. Start exercising right away and there’s a huge possibility that you’ll feel the desire to continue.

Maybe that apparent ease was what made their unions burn so bright from the outside looking in. Maybe that kind of love wasn’t simple. Maybe it was a goal you strove toward every single day for the rest of your lives. A peak you never reached, but that was okay as long as you kept climbing.

We cannot learn if we are stuck in our mind’s conditioned way of thinking. We must be open to discovering the Truth, whatever it may turn out to be. This requires a state of openness, curiosity, and sincerity, a state of pure awareness, a state of observing reality without jumping to conclusions about what reality is. This state of direct experience is known in Zen as “beginner’s mind,” and it is essential to embody this state when we want to understand our experience.

Pink, the color of rose quartz, is a color with a harmonizing, loving vibration. The color and the physical makeup of this kind of quartz combine to make it a powerful force for drawing love into your life. Likewise, the color green has a vibrational resonance with abundance. Therefore, some green stones, such as bloodstone, are particularly good for spellwork involving matters of prosperity.

The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?

Suddenly, when the run itself is the goal, there are no more bad runs. Suddenly it doesn’t matter if we don’t finish within our goal time—or don’t finish at all. What matters is that we tried, that we enjoyed the process. What matters is that we got out there.

What fragment of truth will be mine?

If we want our species to survive in the long term, human beings cannot afford to stop reaching for the stars.

As the Supreme Buddha once said, “The root of suffering is attachment.

As you build your real estate empire, don’t get lost in greed and ambition. Whether through your money, your time, your knowledge, or something else: give back.

Real is an abstract concept. Are we ever ourselves, our whole selves, except when we’re alone?

Until age forty a man has the face he was born with, at forty he has the face he deserves.” George

Panties I don't mind going without, but I have no bra." "You're like me." She smoothed her hands over her small breasts. "We have knots on a wooden plank.

Bide the Wiccan Law ye must In perfect love and perfect trust Eight words the Wiccan Reed fulfill An' ye harm none, do what you will" - Unknown

As the Zen master Suzuki Roshi put it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

The human mind has a gift for making itself miserable by looking constantly at what it does not have, rather than enjoying what it has.

Everyone wants to be happy, no one wants to suffer – remember this always.

I’m committed to never listening to anybody when it comes to my own path and happiness.

Nature itself rests on an internal foundation of archetypal principles symbolized by numbers, shapes, and their arithmetic and geometric relationships.

Anything anyone can point to in nature is composed of small patterns and is a part of larger ones.

In each case, you want a web page dedicated to every keyword.

There is no 60-day, there is only the 365-day marketing campaign, in which you produce content daily. Period.

Don’t be an egg; be a human.

Get used to your mortality. It will eventually consume you so why not pick up an addiction.

Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? While many investors have ‘sprinted’ toward their investment goals, success is most often found by consistent action, not big action.

Since it is in the nature of consciousness to be reflective, we can never fully inhabit any conscious state that we are in, so that our ‘restlessness’ lies in the very nature of our being.

On my way through the living room, I stopped to check on Keet, who hung upside down from his swing like a bat from a cave ceiling. I reached through the bars and scratched his cheek. "Stay weird, my friend.

A MANTRA FOR HOME HEALTH CARE I am my own healer. I have a radiant voice within that guides me. I can make decisions for myself. I can rely on others as needed, but at my discretion. It is my body, my health, my balance, and my responsibility to make right choices for myself. Right choices include working with competent health-care professionals when necessary, allowing friends and family to help as needed, and, above all, being true to my beliefs, with the wisdom and willingness to change as part of the path of healing.

Your mind is yours—and yours alone. If you focus on healthy thoughts and develop balanced opinions about your situation, you will cultivate positive emotions and find lasting enthusiasm to live your best life. You will see negativity for what it is: a waste of energy. You will learn to stop allowing fear, anger, and other anxieties to grow. You will discover not only that you can weather challenges, but you often find them enjoyable.

Only people with skills even have the right to be confident. If you don't have the skill set in an area, but you act confidently, that's delusion. Don't worry about building confidence. You should worry about building skills.

Pantheists are a little vague about what they believe. They say things like ‘My god is everything’ or ‘My god is nature’ or ‘My god is the universe’. Or ‘My god is the deep mystery of everything we don’t understand’. The great Albert Einstein used the word ‘God’ in pretty much this last sense. That’s very different from a god who listens to your prayers, reads your innermost thoughts and forgives (or punishes) your sins—all of which the Abrahamic God is supposed to do. Einstein was adamant that he didn’t believe in a personal god who does any of those things.

However well you do in the competition for the greatest toys, longest life, and healthiest brain, the best medical research indicates that eventually you’re going to be dead. And you’re going to stay dead for many years longer than you were alive, and all that will be left of you is people’s memories of you, which is to say, your reputation.

These three tools of light, energy, and mass by which the Divine geometer constructs the cosmos and by which the symbolic geometer approximates archetypal patterns are also mirrored in us. What scientists call “light, energy, and mass” are the traditional “spirit, soul, and body” described by Plutarch as nous (divine intellect), psyche (soul), and soma (body).

Before I could tell him so, he guided my finger into his mouth and swirled his tongue across the hurt. "Better?" I managed a whimper. "Grier?" he caught me around the waist as my knees liquified. "What's wrong?" "Her ovaries exploded," Lethe called from the living room

When you have Chick Night to look forward to, it can be your light at the end of a long and trying month. It can help you maintain your balance, keep your perspective, and hold on to your sanity during times when you're actually afraid to wonder what else could go wrong.

When the lessons of symbolic or philosophical mathematics seen in nature, which were designed into religious architecture or art, are applied functionally (not just intellectually) to facilitate the growth and transformation of consciousness, then mathematics may rightly be called “sacred.

One of my pet peeves is the habit of labelling young children with the religion of their parents: ‘Catholic child’, ‘Protestant child’, ‘Muslim child’. Such phrases can be heard used of children too young to talk, let alone hold religious opinions. It seems to me as absurd as talking about a ‘Socialist child’ or ‘Conservative child’, and nobody would ever use a phrase like that. I don’t think we should talk about ‘atheist children’ either.

When was the last time you went out for an adults-only evening with one or more of your women friends? If you can’t answer that question without checking the calendar on the wall in your kitchen, flipping through the daytimer on your desk or calling up your computerized calendar, Chick Night™ is a concept that is long overdue.

That's why I can't understand why some personal trainers are out of shape. That's the equivalent of a fucking homeless success coach. Someone might argue, “Well, he knows his stuff though, just because he's not in shape doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about." Who gives a fuck what he knows? It's what he does that counts.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” Despite

Ethereum is the second-biggest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. It’s also very different from Bitcoin in its structure and purpose. Ethereum wasn’t developed as a currency alone. Its innovation lies in opening the blockchain up to development for different applications outside currencies and finance. Developers can build software on top of Ethereum’s blockchain, and use the network’s distributed ledger to build trust for all kinds of applications. Since the Ethereum blockchain is decentralized, once a developer has built an application, it can’t be censored or taken down by any authority. That application lives as long as the Ethereum blockchain continues.

Lizards frolicked in the flames of a bonfire; two lonely fish swam toward each other under the sea; a lion devoured the sun. An eagle flying high in the air was incongruously chained to a toad crawling on the ground. A wolf and dog battled in the middle of a deserted town. A slithering serpent entwined itself around a female corpse lying in an open grave. Another serpent lay nailed to a cross, while other serpents and dragons chased their own tails in never ending circles.

From a yogic perspective, good health starts within. All yogic practices help to keep your skin healthy and radiant. The beauty industry spends a lot of money projecting a certain image of beauty that causes you to feel inadequate if you do not match up to this ideal. From a yogic view you foster your inner beauty through the natural care of your body. The yogi sees their physical body as a temple that houses your soul. True beauty is the reflection of your inner self radiating and touching others

Reading is like skiing. When done well, when done by an expert, both reading and skiing are graceful, harmonious, activities. When done by a beginner, both are awkward, frustrating, and slow. Learning to ski is one of the most humiliating experiences an adult can undergo (that is one reason to start young). After all, an adult has been walking for a long time; he knows where his feet are; he knows how to put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere. But as soon as he puts skis on his feet, it is as though he had to learn to walk all over again. He slips and slides, falls down, has trouble getting up, gets his skis crossed, tumbles again, and generally looks- and feels- like a fool. Even the best instructor seems at first to be of no help. The ease with which the instructor performs actions that he says are simple but that the student secretly believes are impossible is almost insulting. How can you remember everything the instructors says you have to remember? Bend your knees. Look down the hill Keep your weight on the downhill ski. Keep your back straight, but nevertheless lean forward. The admonitions seem endless-how can you think about all that and still ski? The point about skiing, of course, is that you should not be thinking about the separate acts that, together, make a smooth turn or series of linked turns- instead, you should merely be looking ahead of you down the hill, anticipating bumps and other skiers, enjoying the feel of the cold wind on your cheeks, smiling with pleasure at the fluid grace of your body as you speed down the mountain. In other words, you must learn to forget the separate acts in order to perform all of them, and indeed any of them, well. But in order to forget them as separate acts, you have to learn them first as separate acts. only then can you put them together to become a good skier.

The prophet Micah (6:8) summarizes what God wishes for humanity with three commandments: “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Isaiah 56:1 offers two commandments, “Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.” Finally, the Talmud cites Habakkuk 2:4, “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” This is the verse Paul cites in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11, and the Epistle to the Hebrews 10:38 alludes to it as well.

In contrast to advice, our UN-VICE is not a suggestion of behavior or a mandate. Instead, our UN-VICE is a way to decipher changing circumstances imaginatively. All advice should be carefully considered, combined with an emphasis on developing and trusting our own capabilities. In our increasingly UN-VICE world, the value of recommendations is rapidly decreasing. Systemic disruption has devalued ad-vice; instead, we offer our best UN-VICE. Inspired by Richard Feynman, we must explore unanswered questions, rather than adhering to unquestionable answers. Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our UN-VICE draws from the three stages of the Japanese martial arts concept shuhari. In the first stage, shu, the student masters the established fundamentals. In the second stage, ha, the learner practices and experiments with novel approaches, guided by their own unique perspectives. In the third stage, ri, they break loose from confining rulebooks to adapt freely to any situation. Shuhari is a journey, a continuous process of learning, experimenting, and letting go.